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The Rise and Fall of a CIO
Until recently the job of Utah's CIO sounded more like a nightmare. Ask Phil Windley, a professor of computer science at Brigham Young University and former executive at Excite@Home, who served as the state's CIO from 2001 to 2002.
"One of the great wonders of democracy," recalls Windley in an entry on his blog at www.windley.com, "is that every year we turn the budgeting and operation of a $7 billion organization over to a large, unwieldy group of poorly compensated small businesspeople, ranchers, teachers and housewives. Then we tell them they better look like heroes if they want to win the respect of their friends and neighbors so they can come back and do it again. The first time I sat through a legislative subcommittee meeting, I was physically ill."
Windley came into office in 2001 with lofty goals to run the office like a business. He suggested trimming 200 jobs from the state's IT payroll of 900. This proved to be the beginning of the end. Before long, Windley was the subject of controversy. Anonymous letter writers criticized his hiring practices. Accusations of cronyism swirled in local papers. A legislative audit faulted the CIO for not following the rules, but subsequent investigations cleared him of any wrongdoing. Faced with the chaos of a decentralized model, Windley also proposed a different organizational structure. "That didn't get much traction," he says. "I didn't manage my relationship with the Legislature very well. I probably was politically naive."
All took its toll, and Windley resigned.
The former CIO admits that bringing a private-enterprise approach to government without understanding the constraints of the public sector was a mistake. "When I became CIO, the governor asked me to really ramp up e-government," Windley says. "To do things we thought really important, such as integrated business processes, was really difficult to do with so many different IT goals and priorities that were not being coordinated."
Utah, too, was still learning about the role a CIO should play in IT governance. Indeed, state CIOs are a relatively recent phenomenon. In 1992, Gartner's Kost became the first person to get a state CIO title, and the job didn't come with any real authority. "When I was CIO of Michigan in the 1990s, the CIO didn't have an operational responsibility," he recalls. "There are very few states now where the policy and operation functions are separate."
In 2003, W. Val Oveson, a former lieutenant governor and state data center manager, replaced Windley as CIO. Oveson continued building the state's e-government projects, such as a one-stop Web site for getting a business license, but the office itself remained hobbled without any real power.
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